Pun Salad

The talking points went out to the fake news…

Trump “ambushed” the president of South Africa by playing a video montage of South African leaders calling for White genocide.

The media is complicit. pic.twitter.com/zTNqAE0OIf

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 21, 2025

Haley Strack at National Review manages to avoid saying "ambush": Trump Argues With South African President over Country's Treatment of White Farmers.

Haley does (as far as I can tell) a good job of debunking Trump's "mass slaughter" characterization. Although South Africa's homicide rate is yuge (Wikipedia: List of countries by intentional homicide rate), relatively few of them are white farmers.

Also of note:

• Another press triumph. Noah Rothman looks at Yet Another Gaza Famine That Wasn’t. And yet another black mark on our watchdog press:

  Such was the commitment of the international press to the notion that Israel is deliberately engineering a famine in the Gaza Strip that it accepted at face value a claim so logically deficient that an elementary school student should be able to identify the sophistry in it.

  “Around 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if many more aid trucks do not reach Gaza, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief says,” read the claim promulgated by a variety of news outlets, including a since-deleted social-media post promoted by NBC News.

  The first tell readers of this piece will encounter is that the initial 540 words of the report accompanying the post are devoted not to the imminent humanitarian catastrophe that is about to befall the Palestinian population. Rather, it is replete with quotes from critics of Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that the resumption of Israeli combat operations against Hamas risks consigning the Jewish State to “pariah state” status. Indeed, for the prime minister, “killing babies is a pastime,” one of his domestic critics charged.

  You can't distrust these guys enough.

• My LFOD News Alert blew up. All describing pretty much the same story. DHS Secretary, and famed dog-shooter, Kristi Noem up against my state's junior senator Maggie Hassan. Let's go with ABC's take: Kristi Noem fumbles habeas corpus, denies DHS will host citizenship TV show.

  Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem incorrectly responded to a lawmaker's question on the definition of habeas corpus during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on the Department of Homeland Security budget for the upcoming year on Tuesday.

  Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., asked Noem, "What is habeas corpus?"

  The secretary responded, saying, "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country."

  "Excuse me, that's -- that's incorrect," Hassan interjected.

  "Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires, requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason," she said.

  "Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea," Hassan added. "As a senator from the 'Live Free or Die' state, this matters a lot to me and my constituents and to all Americans."

  To be fair, I'm not sure how your average New Hampshire resident would do if challenged to define habeas corpus.

  But Maggie has a law degree from Northeastern, Kristi a mere BA in Poli Sci from South Dakota State U. Still, you might expect her to be up on her Con Law basics.

• Another day older, and… … as Veronique de Rugy observes, America's Credit Is Falling—and the Government Is Still Digging Deeper Into Debt.

  America's debt-addicted government just lost its triple-A credit rating from Moody's, as it previously had from fellow rating agencies S&P and Fitch. Many in Washington shrugged the move off as minor or as unfair treatment of the Trump administration. The truth is more sobering: a flashing red signal that the United States is no longer seen as a "perfect" credit risk and that politicians should stop pretending economic growth alone can bail us out.

  Yes, the mess is real, and it's because habitual deficit financing—the very disease fiscally-minded Founding Father Alexander Hamilton warned against—has become business as usual.

  The reckoning comes as House Republicans push to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts with a "big, beautiful bill." If handled correctly, it's a good idea. But while the legislation aims to avoid tax hikes, it pairs modestly pro-growth provisions with a smorgasbord of costly special interest giveaways. Worse, it assumes we can afford yet another $3 trillion to $5 trillion in debt without serious consequences. That's the kind of magical thinking that spurred the credit downgrade.

  I see that the "big, beautiful bill" passed by a single vote a few hours ago as I type. So: do you believe in magic?

  (Headline reference to this great old song. Saint Peter don't you call us…)

• It ain't us, babe. Daniel J. Mitchell looks at an international comparison to answer the burning question: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What Nation Has the Most School Choice of All? He links to the 2023 edition of the Freedom of Education Index. The top five "best" countries, ed-freedom-wise: Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Chile.

  The US is in a solid 19th place (as of 2023, when the numbers were collected). That showing, while not as good as it could be, doesn't really support the continued assertion that assertion that school choice efforts are this close to destroying America's K-12 "education system".

  The lowest five countries on educational freedom: Afghanistan, Eritrea, North Korea, North Macedonia, and Saudi Arabia.

• Have I let Trump off too easy today? I better link to Kevin D. Williamson to fix that. He looks at the President's Low-Energy Leninism.

  Given that Donald Trump is a borderline illiterate, he has chosen a strange strategy as president: being a writer.

  He is a writer of “executive orders,” many of them press releases disguised as diktats. He is a writer of memos and tweets and presidential statements. I mean that he is a writer of these in the same way he is the writer who wrote The Art of the Deal—which is to say, he didn’t write the thing, but it is, in a broader sense, his work.

  And the thing about work is, Trump does not like it.

  Post-election politics and substantive policymaking—distinct but related activities—require a lot of boring, labor-intensive, grinding work. The really hard part of politics starts after Election Day, and there have always been grinders to be found among the great American politicians qua politicians: James Madison, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Arthur Vandenberg. Sen. Vandenberg may be best remembered for a speech—“The Speech Heard ’Round the World”—but his achievement was in putting that speech into effect by remaking the domestic political landscape of American foreign policy, dragging the GOP out of its isolationist bunker in the face of World War II.

  President Trump doesn’t really do politics—because he is, in fact, utterly incompetent at negotiation, which is why he spends so much time insisting that he is a master of the art. Trump mainly does politics only in those areas where he can operate without much, or any, negotiation: in making appointments, of course, and in doing all that writing that has not and will not amount to much of anything.

  Reader, you really should subscribe to the Dispatch, because concepts like "… hitting yourself with a ballpeen hammer in the body parts that are right there in the name of the instrument" are there for the taking.

Recently on the movie blog:

Since I had such a good experience with getting Harvey on DVD from the Portsmouth Public Library, I decided to pick up The Wild Bunch (two-disc Directors Cut) on my most recent visit. I was in the mood (apparently) for Doomed Male Camaraderie with Extra Violence and also Betrayal. Result: not as good as I remembered.

I remember being impressed with the violence when I saw this as a much younger age. Compared to today's movies, it's not that striking. And the movie really beats you over the head with its protagonists' testosterone-fueled bad decisions.

However, I was more impressed with the movie's cinematography this time around. Surprised it didn't get an Oscar nomination for that.

I also noticed something right at the beginning, and was somewhat surprised that it also made the IMDB trivia list:

Don't piss off Peckinpah, actors.

Anyway: it's the story of the last days of the outlaw gang led by Pike (William Holden). It's a fractious group, including Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Edmond O'Brien, Jaime Sánchez, and (for a few minutes) Bo Hopkins as "Crazy Lee", aka "Sacrificial Lamb". Pike's gang is being pursued by … well, everyone, but most notably a gang of depraved bounty hunters led by Thornton (Robert Ryan, aka "Horse's Ass"). Who, long ago, was Pike's comrade, now is being coerced by Powerful and Corrupt Forces into betrayal.

Spoiler: not many survive.